


Inheritance

by GretaRama



Category: Agent Pendergast Series - Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child
Genre: F/M, Gen, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-09
Updated: 2015-01-09
Packaged: 2018-03-06 20:31:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,667
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3147641
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GretaRama/pseuds/GretaRama
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Pendergast dreams of what might of been and contemplates what might yet be. Set some time after Two Graves (and therefore: spoilers for Two Graves).</p>
            </blockquote>





	Inheritance

_Helen leaps out of bed in the morning and rushes to the bathroom, where he can hear her retching miserably for several minutes. When she comes back, though, she looks composed, serene, even happy. He’s already known, or at least suspected, for weeks, but hasn’t said anything, afraid that speaking of it will make it untrue somehow – and more than anything, he wants this child, his and Helen’s, to be real. She snuggles back under the covers, wiggling to get closer, pressing her warm backside against him. He buries his face in her sweet-smelling auburn hair and puts his arm around her. She places one hand over his, drawing it down to her belly, to the almost unnoticeable curve there, and this is all the confirmation he needs._

_He has always cringed inwardly at the phrase “emotional rollercoaster,” but over the next few months he comes to respect the aptness of the phrase. He experiences moments of delirious joy one moment, imagining the charming little boy or girl who will be a reflection of everyone he has ever loved. Would their son resemble Diogenes, or Judson, or be another little replica of his father, as he was? Would their daughter look like Helen, or his mother? He studies an old photograph of his great aunt Cornelia and her brother Ambergris as children, wondering if this stiff, formal image of the past might also be a prediction of the future._

_The next moment, he plummets into an abyss of doubt, wondering how deeply rooted any of these resemblances might be. Helen is bright, outgoing, clever and funny, and he wants to believe that his children will inherit her temperament, but countless generations of murder, suicide and madness press a sinister thumb onto the genetic scale._

_His relationship with Helen also swings around deliriously, constantly moving between extremes. He is more aroused by her than he has ever been, the fact of their child growing inside her the single most erotic thing he has ever contemplated. He can no longer lose himself in ascetic contemplation of art or philosophy; his mind is constantly hijacked by feral lust. She is like a ripe peach, all soft curves and tender flesh. He caresses her increasingly exuberant hips and breasts and belly, concupiscent and full of wonder._

_As they lay together in the aftermath of lovemaking, he holds her heated body and feels something he is sure must be akin to religious awe. He has understood the biology of what is happening since before Diogenes was born, but didn’t anticipate the reverence the process would awaken in him._

_They plan and prepare, but even when she presses his hand on the place where a baby’s tiny foot has just kicked, he can’t really imagine how his life will change, how he will feel about this tiny new person he has helped to create._

_As Helen’s discomfort increases in late pregnancy, he discovers new depths of shame, unable as he is to share or even imagine the difficulties she endures with apparent equanimity. The waiting has become a way of life, and his role in their relationship has shifted from that of lover to abject attendant, catering to her every whim. He feels miserably inadequate, fetching and carrying while she singlehandedly sustains their child’s life inside her body._

_He learns a valuable lesson about clichés on the night when their children are born. She rouses him with one hand on his shoulder. “Aloysius, it’s time,” she whispers, and his mind goes horrifyingly blank. His composure and ability to act are saved by the fact that the process is so banal. He collects the little suitcase by the door, holds himself together during the car ride to the hospital, manages not to take offense as he is shepherded from one room to the next by hospital staff. As have countless fathers before him, he changes into scrubs, washes his hands, and is led into the room where Helen awaits him, and he holds her hand as she bears first one, then another of their sons into the world._

_What the cliché has concealed from him is the power of the moment when he is handed one tiny infant and Helen is handed the other. The squirming bundle is so small, so helpless, and so unutterably precious, the force of his love and hope buckles his knees and he subsides awkwardly into the chair beside Helen’s bed. For this, there is no conceivable frame of reference, no rule to guide his behavior, and so it is at this moment that he falls apart, weeping helplessly as he looks at the tiny beings he and Helen have brought into the world._

***

The fantasy, so vivid it almost feels like a memory, dispels as he awakens, alone, in his bedroom. Helen is dead, and whatever the truth of her feelings for him, she made the decision to surrender their children to a Nazi eugenics experiment nearly twenty years ago. If her conviction wavered at all in that time, he would never know, and it didn’t really matter. In the end, she had decided that it was better for him never to know his own children. 

His blindness where Helen is concerned is dismayingly complete. If he had returned home early from his deployment that year, when he estimates she would have been about two months along, would he have noticed it then? She gave herself less than a month to recover from the birth before returning home. He wonders how he overlooked the physical evidence that must have been there, tries to remember any changes in her body that might have given her away, but can think of nothing. 

He is tormented by various painful explanations for her behavior. Fischer had told him about the supposed necessity for Helen to return to Brazil or risk miscarriage, but he suspects Helen, a doctor, could probably have worked out an alternative means of sustaining her pregnancy without Der Bund. Had she felt her children would be better off being raised in the Brazilian jungle than by the scion of a family most notable for its shocking episodes of madness and criminality? Had she, at least at first, been more invested in the eugenics experiment? Or had she simply never believed he could protect her, let alone their children?

This latter possibility is the starting point of a logical syllogism he has been avoiding for some time. If she did not believe he could protect her, then she did not trust him. Without trust, there is no love. If she did not trust him, then…

But his mind veers away, as usual, and he is left to contemplate his cowardice instead.

He goes through his morning routine, showering, shaving, dressing, the sameness of every element –the sequence, toiletries, clothing, shoes, foods and beverages – decided upon long ago, because it helped to keep him on an even keel. Every agony in his life has been precipitated by some sort of change to his habitat. He learned early on that this basic maintenance produced a pleasing feeling of control. Even now, well into middle age, he finds the predictability soothing. 

He drinks tea and stares at a priceless painting, an impressionist masterpiece in shades of green and cream and gold, tries to let his mind go blank, to forget the poignant but despicably sentimental dream of familial happiness. Millions of people, he tells himself, have had that experience, and few of them are truly happy as a result. 

And in the end, he was able to save Tristram. He now has a son, a sweet, simple son who loves him in a way that is both uncomplicated and impossible to fathom. It terrifies him, having yet another helpless hostage to fortune. He has failed everyone he has ever loved; his parents, his brother, his wife, his friends, even Alban. He considers another memory crossing, another attempt to conjure up the ghostly simulacrum of Helen, to ask her what he should do, but he knows it won’t work. All he has to work with is what he knows, and he never knew anything about Helen, not really.

He knows even less about being a parent, and feels a guilty kind of relief that Tristram is mostly grown, that he has not discovered his son in a bassinet on his doorstep. He has had a trial run at this brand of parenting with Corrie Swanson. With her, though, he had needed to keep a certain distance to ward off any appearance of – or temptation to indulge in – impropriety, and Corrie thrived, even in the arid climate of his guardianship.

He can’t maintain that kind of distance with Tristram. The boy openly longs for the attention of his father, and there is a corresponding longing inside Pendergast, too, who remembers the loneliness, awkwardness, and desperation of his own teenage years all too keenly. He loves the boy, loves him overwhelmingly, totally, with an intensity that borders on fanaticism, and he attributes this to the manner in which he came to discover his long-lost son. 

He had been on the very edge of suicide, dead in all but body, numb, cold, drowning in his own apathy. He had survived for years without Helen, mostly by shutting down the part of himself that clamored for intimacy and understanding. Her sudden resurrection and murder had awakened his long-dormant heart only to deliver what he had thought was the final, killing blow.

But the moment he first looked at Tristram, the physical echo of everyone he had ever loved and lost, he had dared to hope. His heart, that battered but rugged old veteran, got up again, insisting that they had lost a few battles, but might yet win the war. Still, he holds back, afraid of what will happen if he dares to acknowledge his love for this boy. 

It has not occurred to him, until this very moment, to worry about what will happen if he doesn’t.


End file.
